


Mothers Day

by glittercracker



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Gen, Gon's real mom, Mother-Son Relationship, do not copy to another site
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-13
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2020-03-02 13:56:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18812284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glittercracker/pseuds/glittercracker
Summary: It's the day after Gon's 16th birthday, and he gets the last present he ever expected.





	Mothers Day

**Author's Note:**

> Been kicking this idea around for a while and then, well, hey presto, it's Mother's Day! Thanks to zappychild for the super-fast beta!

The knock was so tentative that Gon almost ignored it. Then it came again, this time louder and firmer.

 

He set the dish he had been washing back in the sink, and went to open the front door. His birthday, the previous day, had been cool and wet, but today was fresh and sunny. All of the doors and windows except the heavy front one were open to let in the spring air, and so the door blew inward as soon as he touched the handle.

 

A woman stood on the worn sandstone step, one Gon had never seen before. She was about Mito’s age, maybe a few years older. She was several inches taller than Gon, with features that were more striking than pretty, thick black hair in a braid that reached the center of her back. She wore a simply cut, brick red dress and had a worn leather pack strapped to her back. A shiver ran down Gon’s spine when he met her eyes, almond-shaped and not far off black.

 

“Hello?” Gon said warily. Strangers on Whale Island were, after all, few and far between, and none ever came out this far.

 

The woman offered a tentative smile. “Hello. Are you Gon Freecss?”

 

An accented voice, though Gon couldn’t place where it came from. It sent another shiver through him, this one stronger than the last. “Yes? Should I know you?”

 

The woman’s smile turned rueful. “You should, but you don’t. And that’s entirely my fault.” Gon cocked his head, uncertain whether he should say anything else. But then the woman drew a breath, closed her eyes, let it out, and opened them.

 

“Gon,” she said, “my name is Leona Ilawan. I’m your mother.”

*

When Mito set out the tea, her hands were shaking. “Is there anything else you’d like?” she asked, the tension in her tone clear.

 

“No, thank you,” Leona said, offering a smile that Mito returned only wanly. “You really didn’t need to go to all this trouble.”

 

“It’s nothing. I’ll be in the garden if you need anything.”

 

“Mito,” Gon said, stricken at the thought of being left alone with this not-quite-stranger, “you can stay.”

 

“No,” Mito said, her voice a tangle of emotions Gon couldn’t begin to unravel, “I really can’t.” Nodding again, she left them alone in the living room and went out the back door.

 

Gon watched her go, and then turned back to Leona. She was slender rather than stocky—he’d inherited his body type from Ging, like so much else. However, he seemed to have his mother’s height: he was already inches taller than Ging, and still growing. It was strange, disconcerting to finally know where these pieces of himself had come from. Not a rock, thank the gods, as so many people liked to jest.

 

“So…” Gon began, with very little idea of where he was headed. “How did you meet Ging?”

 

Leona swallowed a sip of tea and then set her cup down, smiling. It was almost the smile that he saw in the mirror, but not quite. “We went after the same mark. Got there at the same time. I claimed it, he challenged me to a race to the next one.”

 

Gon set his own cup down with a clatter, his mind racing. How had he never imagined, in all of the times he’d imagined his mother, that she was also a hunter? But still, he had to confirm it.

 

“You’re a Hunter?” he asked.

 

Leona inclined her head gracefully. “Triple Star.”

 

Gon gazed at her for a moment, stunned. Only a handful of Triple Star hunters in the world, and his mother was one of them? Both his parents, really, although Ging wouldn’t complete the work needed to secure the credential. Gon had never determined whether this was stubbornness or laziness, but either way, Leona was clearly of a very different cut of cloth. Which begged a question. Well, a host of them.

 

“Why haven’t I heard of you?”

 

Her smile brightened. “Because I make sure that no one does.”

 

“Okay.” Gon inclined his own head, face burning at the thought of speaking the next question. But he made himself look up again at that fierce woman who had borne him. “But you and Ging? I…I mean, how…”

 

Now Leona laughed. “You only met him the one time, right? Two years ago, at the World Tree.”

 

“That’s right,” Gon told her, uncertain how to read her face. The expression was wry on the heels of laughter, but there was no smile in her eyes, no real humor. There were, in fact, tinges of bitterness, and self-deprecation.

 

Leona sighed, broke a bit off of the biscuit on her plate, but didn’t bring it to her mouth. “I was sixteen when I met Ging. He was nineteen. He was…not the man you met. Not even close. He was…” Leona looked up at Gon, studied him for a moment. “Well, very much like you, I suspect. He certainly looked like you. He laughed a lot. He was always ready for an adventure. So very easy to fall in love with.”

 

_Is that me?_ Gon wondered. _Or is that only her, trying to be kind?_ The woman wore the smile that adults always wore when they spoke about the nicer portions of their past. Full of fondness, and with a soft violet shadow of regret. None of it, Gon suspected, was for him.

 

“You loved him,” Gon said, turning the words over in his heart as he turned them on his tongue: slowly, uncertain of whether he quite liked the taste.

 

Leona sighed. “He was the love of my life, Gon,” she said, “hard as that no doubt is for you to believe. I have seen him a few times, over the years. I know what he is now; what he hasn’t been to you. And of course, I’m no better.”

 

Gon studied her: the blue-black of her hair in the sunlight, the premature lines around her eyes telling a story of a life lived outdoors, against difficult odds. The tension in the line of her mouth, as she no doubt waited for his anger to erupt. Had the Ging she had known been angry? Was that what had ultimately divided them? The thought made him sad, both for her and for himself. After all, he wasn’t yet certain whether that anger had lost him the love of his own life; but he _did_ know that it no longer ruled him.

 

“So what happened?” he asked at last, gently.

 

Leona blinked at him for a moment. Then, incrementally, she began to tell him what she’d no doubt come to tell him, and to relax. “Nothing particularly original,” she said. “We were young, and careless. You were born not long after I turned seventeen. Far too young to be a mother.”

 

She drew a breath, sighed it out. “But we did try. For a year and a half we tried to be good parents to you. But neither of us was cut out for it, or for family life, and the strain of it turned both of us bitter. By the end we hated each other, and you were suffering for it.”

 

She paused, sighed again. “I wanted to spare you that. You hadn’t asked to be born, or to have two selfish children for parents. I’ll never pretend that what I did was noble. But when I left you, Gon, I knew that Ging had a family who would care for you the way you deserved. Please believe that I wouldn’t have left if I hadn’t thought you would be better off because of it.”

 

Gon considered her words, watching through the window as Mito pulled weeds in the garden and Abe lounged in an old deck chair. “They wanted me,” he said at last. “Mito and Abe. They gave me the best of childhoods, and when I messed up…ah, do you know about…?” He glanced up at Leona, hoping to all the merciful gods that he wouldn’t have to re-hash that particular story.

 

“Yes,” she said quickly. “I know what happened after the war with the ants. It’s part of the reason I came. I always meant to come, and you always think you’ll have time…” She paused, turning her head away, but not before Gon saw the tears in her eyes. “I would have come when you were in the hospital,” she said. “But I didn’t find out what had happened until recently. I’m so sorry.”

 

Gon shook his head. “It’s okay. I had family with me there. Not blood family, but still family, if you know what I mean.”

 

Leona smiled a little. “I do know what you mean. And I’m glad.”

 

“Well, anyway,” Gon said, “Mito and Abe were here for me after all of that. So you and Ging, you didn’t really mess up. Not when it counted.”

 

Leona was looking at him intently, the way Killua or Mito sometimes did: like she was looking into him. “I’m glad,” she said.

 

For a time they sat sipping their tea, the only sounds the whine of the wind through the old house and the distant crash of waves at the cliff base. Then Gon thought of something else. “Why now? I mean, why did you come to see me now?”

 

Leona smiled. “A very good friend of yours found me, and suggested it might be a nice birthday present, this being your sixteenth and all. I tried to make it on time, but the storm delayed the ferry.”

 

Gon’s heart was beating fast; he felt himself expanding like a flower to the sun, imagining blue eyes and a mischievous smile. “A very good friend? Who?”

 

Leona tilted her head slightly; another gesture Gon recognized as his own. “They swore me to secrecy. But I would say, probably a best friend.”

 

“Ohhh…”

 

“Mmm,” Leona said. “I think you are very rich in friends, Gon Freecss. Now, I think that I’ve taken enough of your time, and your family’s. But before I go, I want to make you an offer.” She drew a deep breath. “I know that I’ve been no kind of mother to you. Really, I’m no better than a stranger. But I also know that Ging has been an even worse father, if that’s possible. And I can’t make up for being absent from your childhood, but I _can_ offer to be present for you now. I’ll be leaving on the next ferry for a hunt, and I’d love for you to come with me, if you’d like to.”

 

Gon perked up at this. “A Hunter target?”

 

Leona smiled, and nodded. “A Triple Star Hunter target.”

 

“Just you and me?”

 

“Just you an me.”

 

Gon blinked at her. “Wow. I mean… _wow!”_

Leona laughed, and stood up. “I take that as a good sign. But still, I want you to think about it. And talk to your family about it. I’m not here to take you away from them.”

 

“Oh!” Gon said, leaping up. “They won’t think that! Why don’t you stay for lunch?”

 

Leona shook her head. “Thank you, but I really think you need some time without me to think about all of this. It’s a lot to take in.”

 

“I guess,” Gon said thoughtfully, walking with her to the door, and opening it.

 

“Whatever you decide, Gon,” Leona said, turning on the front step to face him, “I’m very glad to have met you. And I won’t leave it so long again.”

 

Gon nodded, and paused, and then leaned forward, pulling his mother into his arms. She hugged him back, and he was certain that he heard a muffled sob somewhere in that embrace. But when he let her go, she’d hidden all trace of tears, and she smiled once before she set off down the path toward town.

*

“Gon,” Mito sighed the third time she caught him staring out the window rather than eating his dinner, “you don’t have to pretend.”

 

“Hmm?” he asked, turning back to the table.

 

“I know that she asked you to go with her. Your mother.”

 

He could hear the strain in her voice as she spoke the word, but her eyes remained calm. He flushed. “Sorry.”

 

Mito shook her head. “You have nothing to be sorry for! Of course you would want to get to know her. And the offer to travel with someone like her, relationship aside…well, I can imagine what that would mean to you.”

 

“A Triple Star Hunter? Yeah, that isn’t an offer you get every day.”

 

“It’s quite the opportunity,” Mito agreed. Abe nodded to herself, half-smiling, though Gon couldn’t tell if she was agreeing or simply nodding at her own thoughts, whatever they might be.

 

“Yeah, it is,” Gon agreed. “And no matter what I decide, the first thing I have to do is thank Killua.”

 

Mito paused with a glass of iced tea half way to her lips, and set it down again. “Thank Killua for…what, exactly?”

 

“Sending her here. Leona.” He shrugged, and then paused in confusion when Mito’s look turned to one of panic. “Mito?” he asked, uncertain. “What’s wrong?”

 

Her look turned even stranger then, the confusion now mixed with pain. “Is that what she told you?” she asked. “That Killua sent her?”

 

“Well, not exactly,” Gon said. “She said that a friend of mine found her and asked her to come for my birthday, and made her promise not to tell who it was. But Killua said that he was sending me a present and it would probably be late, and she was late, so…? Mito?”

 

His aunt’s face had gone white. “You can’t call Killua, Gon.”

 

“What?”

 

“You just can’t. Promise me you won’t.”

 

Gon shook his head, entirely baffled. “I mean, okay, if you really don’t want me to. But why don’t you want me to, when he went to all that trouble? I mean it must have been him, she said it was my best friend—”

 

Abruptly, Mito shoved away from the table and hurried out the back door. Gon gaped after her, and then turned to Abe as she spoke, her voice like tree branches rubbing together in a soft wind. “Killua may be _one_ of your best friends, Gon. But he isn’t the only one, and he wasn’t the first.”

 

“What—?” Oh. _Oh!_ He was an idiot, just like Killua had always said he was.

He was an idiot who was running for the back door as well, chasing after Mito. He crossed the meadow to the sea-cliff where she had held him as they watched his father sail away. Held him while he wailed in her arms, not understanding why this skinny young girl was holding him instead of his Mama or his Dada. But she’d kept on holding him through the nights when he screamed and beat at her with tiny fists and round legs, sleepless and furious that she wasn’t who he wanted. And kept on holding him while he slept, hot and sticky with tears and fury and plagued by nightmares he couldn’t put words to, though as an orphan herself, she could imagine them only too well.

 

She’d kept on holding him until gradually his lost family faded to ghosts, and then further still: to people who might as well have never been, because now his parents were Mito and Abe and he couldn’t remember ever having loved anybody else. She held him the increasingly infrequent times that he wanted her to, after he learned to run further and further away from her. And she held him that last morning, right here, before he left her as his father had once done, for a world he really wasn’t ready to face.

 

No doubt she had stood here afterward, just like this, watching him leave her behind, as it seemed her fate to be left behind by those she loved the most. No doubt she had watched until his ship was out of sight, stoic until he was truly gone, only then unfettering the tears she’d held in check for so long, for his sake. Gon didn’t know many things for certain, yet, but he did know this: he would never make her cry like that again.

 

Except she was already crying. So he gathered her into his arms and rested his chin on her soft hair as she crumpled against him, sobbing her heart out onto the worn green sleeve she had sewn for him. She cried for a long time as the twilight deepened around them and the sea sank to black. When she finally stopped, she pulled away, turning from him.

 

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

 

Gon pulled her back with an arm around her shoulder, and guided her to sit with him in the soft grass. “I’m glad you did.”

 

She laughed, though the sound was still full of tears. “How can you say that?”

 

“Because I bet I’ve made you cry a lot, and you shouldn’t have to do it alone. Plus, you never say what you really think, and, well, I’m old enough to hear it.”

 

“That’s very sweet, Gon, but I promised myself when I adopted you that I would never stand in the way of you being who you would be. I mean, I knew who your parents were. I didn’t delude myself that Whale Island would be enough for you.”

 

Gon sighed. “Well _that’s_ very sweet too, but you’re still older and wiser than I am. A _lot_ wiser. I sure could have used your advice when I was away, and I doubt that will be the last time. So it’s okay for you to say you don’t want me to go with Leona.”

 

Mito sighed. “No, Gon, it isn’t. I can’t keep your mother from you. I did enough of that when you were little, and I’ll never forgive myself.”

 

Gon’s forehead crumpled. “Is that why you invited her here? Because you felt guilty about telling me they died?”

 

Mito choked on another sob.

 

“Mito!” Gon sighed, hugging her tightly again. “I don’t blame you for that. It was a kindness, in its way.”

 

“To make you think your parents were dead?”

 

“That was a hell of a lot better than having to think they just didn’t want me.”

 

“But that wasn’t quite right, either. I fought Ging for you.”

 

“Yeah, and did he ever once try to get in touch with me after that?”

 

Mito sighed. “And Leona—she was so young. She didn’t know how to be a mother.”

 

“You were younger, and you did it. Anyway, I’m not going with her.”

 

“Gon, don’t you dare turn down the chance of a lifetime because of me!”

 

Gon smiled at Mito, her face soft in the first light of the moon, her eyes still full of tears though he could see how hard she was fighting them. “That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

 

“She’s a Triple Star Hunter, Gon—and she’s your mother.”

 

“You’re still the stronger one. You were barely more than a child yourself, and you raised someone else’s baby more or less alone. So no, Mito, she isn’t my mother. You are.”

 

At that, Mito gave up trying not to cry, and let Gon hold her while she wept.

 

“Just so you know,” he said, “I was never actually considering going with her.”

 

Mito managed to control herself enough to make a noise of surprise.

 

“Nope. I mean, maybe someday. And yes, I’d like to get to know her. But what I’ve really been thinking about lately is traveling with _you.”_

At that, Mito sat back and stared at him. “Me? Traveling? But I can’t leave Abe…the house…”

 

“But you can! Abe can have someone to stay, the house has stayed put this long, it’ll stay put longer. But you—I think it’s time you saw the world.”

 

Mito smiled. “I have to say, that sounds nice. Although, maybe not all at once?”

 

Gon smiled. “Piece by piece. In your own time. But choose somewhere—maybe for next winter?”

 

Mito laughed, and then kissed Gon on the head. “You’re a good boy, Gon.”

 

He grinned. “I’m not, a lot of the time. But when I am, you definitely get the credit.” Then his smile gentled. “I love you, Mito.”

 

“I love you too, Gon. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”

 

“Yeah? Well, that makes two of us.”

 

And they sat in companionable silence, watching night fall and the moon rise, neither for the first time nor the last.

 


End file.
